Expert

A post about a photo of some beer.

“Beer stimulates each of the five senses”

So says regularly-stimulated Denis da Silva and he should know because he’s the Head Brewer at SAB in Newlands.

Here is the man himself (in green) in the SAB bar, teaching some good-looking chap about the visual side of SA’s most award winning beer during the Carling Black Label brewery tour last week.

Today in photos

Not all mine, either.

Firstly, a-ha’s appearance to sign copies of their 73rd greatest hits album: 25:The Very Best Of a-ha at Oxford Street’s HMV, which I couldn’t attend because Oxford Street is in London and I am in Cape Town. Initially, this seemed like a very bad thing, but it wasn’t really because I got to go round a brewery. There are no breweries on Oxford Street in London. (I haven’t verified this fact in any way, but it seems a fairly good bet).

Photo from HMV get closer

But as I say, thanks to the Ogilvy and the champion taste of Carling Black Label, I was invited on a Brewery Tour and Tasting – the beer, not the brewery – which was fun, interesting, informative and quite staggering when it came to sheer size and numbers. They make a lot of beer in Newlands. A lot. More than 1,000,000 litres a day.
And that, as I may have mentioned, is a lot.

The official photographs, from the official photographer are yet to come (and we’ll surely revisit this when they do), but I did knock a few pics off with my trusty 8MP X10 camera.
Keen mathematicians amongst you will have calculated that that amounts to a whole 3,000,000 pixels more than an iPhone 4, of course. Loving all these 0’s this evening.

Here’s a remarkable device filling the bottles in the bottling plant

It’s called a bottle filler and it spins around rather fast.
The whole bottling plant was hugely impressive (and rather noisy) as this short collection of video clips proves. It was a bit like watching the Discovery Channel in person. Except that there were no repeats.
The rest of the photos are here – blurring slightly as the day progressed. I wonder why.